Brown back in town to turn power play around

Plodding. Predictable. Passive.

The Canucks’ power play was all of the above this past National Hockey League season. It was a mishmash that suffered from the wrong personnel, lost faceoffs, slow breakouts and slower entries.

And that was before setting up in the offensive zone, where indecision and point shots that were either blocked or sailed way wide only made it worse.

Not surprisingly, the result was a 29th-ranked power play that had a pitiful 14.1 per cent success rate.

Amid an array of problems plaguing the league’s second-worst team, the return of Newell Brown on Wednesday as a Canucks assistant coach is significant.

The architect of power-play glory days in Vancouver — No. 1 ranked in 2011 (24.3 per cent) and No. 4 in 2012 (19.8 per cent) — has the sobering task of keeping the rebuild from running off the rails in what will be another trying season.

So what can Brown do, a coach who wasn’t rehired following four seasons with the Arizona Coyotes, who had the 26th-ranked power play this season?

“It (power play) has become a lot more specialized,” said Brown, who was let go here after the 2012-13 season along with Alain Vigneault and Rick Bowness, but has close ties to new coach Travis Green.

“You have to change with the times and know what’s going on in the game.”

In 2011, Daniel Sedin scored 18 of his 41 goals on the power play.

Ryan Kesler collected 15 of his 32 goals on the power play and even though Sami Salo was limited to 27 regular-season games, his two power-play blasts in Game 4 of the Western Conference Final paved the way for a series win and a Stanley Cup final appearance.

Today, the Canucks have too many question marks and no exclamation marks. Daniel Sedin led with six power-play goals this season, while Loui Eriksson had five and Brandon Sutter four.

Brown believes the 1-3-1 formation — three players aligned down the middle like an ‘I’ formation in football — remains viable.

“You have to have a lot of variations, I don’t think you can do just one thing,” said Brown. “I like the drop pass and I like to have three or four different break-outs — including a speed one and a drop-back one.

“Having unpredictability to your power play with lots of movement and motion is important, but you can never get away from the fundamentals of shooting and having timely net presence.”